FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

The Democrats’ 2014 Whitewash

Why are nearly all the statewide Democratic candidates this year white?

Barack Obama’s electoral success has shown the Democratic Party the value of a non-white candidate in driving turnout and enthusiasm among the non-white voters that are vital to the party’s success. So why are nearly all the statewide Democratic candidates this year white?

If there is one central theme to the political strategy of the Democrats and the electoral analysis and optimism of liberal pundits in the Obama era, it is race. To say that they are obsessed with these topics is to vastly understate the case. Virtually every analysis of “the Republicans’ demographic problems” and the long-term case for Democratic/progressive dominance is premised upon the rising share of non-white voters in the electorate and their identification with the Democrats. To be sure, these are not Republicans’ only challenges – even with younger white voters there are a few issues (mainly same-sex marriage and marijuana) on which the GOP is out of step with generational trends, and there is legitimate concern that younger voters of all races are less likely to be religious or get married, two traditional markers of conservatism. But even looking at the 2012 election returns, we see that Barack Obama lost white women by the largest margin of any candidate of either party since Walter Mondale, suffered a huge reversal among white voters under 30 (who he lost by 7 points after winning them by double digits in 2008), and even narrowly lost white women under 30. So, all of the Democrats’ advantages along gender and age lines are still really just symptoms of a racially polarized electorate.

Barack Obama was not prophecy. Whatever had been laid before him, it takes gifted hands to operate, repeatedly, on a country scarred by white supremacy. The significance of the moment comes across, not simply in policy, by in the power of symbolism. I don’t expect, in my lifetime, to again see a black family with the sheer beauty of Obama’s on such a prominent stage. (In the private spaces of black America, I see them all the time.) I don’t expect to see a black woman exuding the kind of humanity you see here on such a prominent stage ever again….I don’t ever expect to see a black man of such agile intelligence as the current president put before the American public ever again.

This symbolism has real meaning. What your country tells you it thinks of you has real meaning. If you see people around you acquiring college degrees and rising only to work as Pullman porters or in the Post Office, while in other communities men become rich, you take a certain message from this. If you see your father being ripped off in the sharecropping fields of Mississippi, you take a certain message about your own prospects. If the preponderance of men in your life are under the supervision of the state, you take some sense of how your country regards you. And if you see someone who is black like you, and was fatherless like you, and endures the barbs of American racism like you, and triumphs like no one you’ve ever known, that too sends a message.

And this messenger – who is Barack Obama – becomes something more to black people. He becomes a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities. For liberals and Democrats, the prospect of an Obama defeat in 2012 meant the reversal of an agenda they favored. For black people, the fight was existential. “Please proceed, governor,” will always mean something more to us, something akin to Ali’s rope-a-dope, Louis over Schmeling, or Doug Williams over John Elway.

How does a black writer approach The Man when The Man is not just us, but the Champion of our ambitions?

Or here is the Daily Beast’s Jamelle Bouie, writing in the midst of that election:

The upside of making the race of the candidate an existential issue for African-American voters is, it’s a tremendous motivator to turn out to keep the symbolic leader in office. The downside is, it’s not easily transferable to other candidates – not to other non-white candidates for lower offices, and certainly not to a bunch of white politicians who look pretty much just like the people they are running against.

And yet, bafflingly, that is exactly what the Democrats are running in 2014. At this writing, the Democrats are running a candidate in 62 Senate and Governors’ races this fall (nobody has really stepped forward yet in the Nevada, Tennessee or Wyoming Governors’ races). And depending how you count the frontrunners, anywhere from 57 to 60 of those 62 candidates will be white (92-96%), and 47 to 49 of them will be white males (more than 75%). Let’s take a look at that roster of candidates, ranked by a very rough ranking of the competitiveness of the races (“1″ being hotly contested races, “2” being races that will be contested but with a clear favorite, “3” being races that look lopsided and may end up being de facto cakewalks – this is giving the benefit of the doubt that a lot more races will be competitive than polling may suggest, but races like the New York and Texas governorships will be big-time battles even if the outcome seems pretty clear in advance). I also rated as at least a 2 every race with a Republican Senate incumbent who has a non-obscure Tea Party challenger. I marked with an asterisk the races in which the Democrats have a significant chance of ending up with a different candidate – for example, the one black female candidate here, Richland County Councilwoman Joyce Dickerson in South Carolina, is an obscure candidate with a white male opponent in a race so unlikely to be contested that there’s been no polling (I rate her as the frontrunner because she at least holds elective office, but with a primary electorate that ran Alvin Greene in 2010, you never know). One white male Democratic Senator, Brian Shatz, faces an Asian female primary opponent, Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa, who may well defeat him, and David Alameel in Texas is in a runoff with Kesha Rogers, a black female LaRouchie who wants to impeach Obama. On the flip side, the two non-white Democratic frontrunners for Governor, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras in Rhode Island and Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown in Maryland, still face significant white primary opponents – Rhode Island State Treasurer Gina Raimondo and Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, respectively. So the number of non-white candidates could easily go down rather than up.

State

Office

Status

D Candidate

Competitive?

Race

Gender

AK

SEN

Incumbent D

Mark Begich

1

White

Male

AR

SEN

Incumbent D

Mark Pryor

1

White

Male

CO

SEN

Incumbent D

Mark Udall

1

White

Male

LA

SEN

Incumbent D

Mary Landrieu

1

White

Female

NC

SEN

Incumbent D

Kay Hagan

1

White

Female

NH

SEN

Incumbent D

Jeanne Shaheen

1

White

Female

CO

GOV

Incumbent D

John Hickenlooper

1

White

Male

CT

GOV

Incumbent D

Dan Malloy

1

White

Male

IL

GOV

Incumbent D

Pat Quinn

1

White

Male

MT

SEN

Incumbent D (App)

John Walsh

1

White

Male

KY

SEN

Incumbent R

Alison Lundergan Grimes

1

White

Female

FL

GOV

Incumbent R

Charlie Crist

1

White

Male

KS

GOV

Incumbent R

Paul Davis

1

White

Male

ME

GOV

Incumbent R

Mike Michaud

1

White

Male

MI

GOV

Incumbent R

Mark Schauer

1

White

Male

NM

GOV

Incumbent R

Gary King*

1

White

Male

OH

GOV

Incumbent R

Ed Fitzgerald

1

White

Male

PA

GOV

Incumbent R

Tom Wolf*

1

White

Male

IA

SEN

Open D

Bruce Braley

1

White

Male

MI

SEN

Open D

Gary Peters

1

White

Male

MA

GOV

Open D

Martha Coakley*

1

White

Female

RI

GOV

Open D

Angel Taveras*

1

Hispanic

Male

MN

SEN

Incumbent D

Al Franken

2

White

Male

NM

SEN

Incumbent D

Tom Udall

2

White

Male

OR

SEN

Incumbent D

Jeff Merkley

2

White

Male

VA

SEN

Incumbent D

Mark Warner

2

White

Male

HI

GOV

Incumbent D

Neil Abercrombie

2

White

Male

MN

GOV

Incumbent D

Mark Dayton

2

White

Male

NH

GOV

Incumbent D

Maggie Hassan

2

White

Female

NY

GOV

Incumbent D

Andrew Cuomo

2

White

Male

OR

GOV

Incumbent D

John Kitzhaber

2

White

Male

HI

SEN

Incumbent D (App)

Brian Shatz*

2

White

Male

KS

SEN

Incumbent R

Chad Taylor

2

White

Male

ME

SEN

Incumbent R

Shenna Bellows

2

White

Female

MS

SEN

Incumbent R

Travis Childers

2

White

Male

GA

GOV

Incumbent R

Jason Carter

2

White

Male

IA

GOV

Incumbent R

Jack Hatch

2

White

Male

SC

GOV

Incumbent R

Vincent Sheheen

2

White

Male

WI

GOV

Incumbent R

Mary Burke

2

White

Female

SD

SEN

Open D

Rick Weiland

2

White

Male

WV

SEN

Open D

Natalie Tennant

2

White

Female

AR

GOV

Open D

Mike Ross

2

White

Male

MD

GOV

Open D

Anthony Brown*

2

Black

Male

GA

SEN

Open R

Michelle Nunn

2

White

Female

AZ

GOV

Open R

Chuck Hassebrook

2

White

Male

TX

GOV

Open R

Wendy Davis

2

White

Female

DE

SEN

Incumbent D

Chris Coons

3

White

Male

IL

SEN

Incumbent D

Dick Durbin

3

White

Male

NJ

SEN

Incumbent D

Cory Booker

3

Black

Male

RI

SEN

Incumbent D

Jack Reed

3

White

Male

CA

GOV

Incumbent D

Jerry Brown

3

White

Male

VT

GOV

Incumbent D

Peter Shumlin

3

White

Male

SC

SEN

Incumbent R

Jay Stamper

3

White

Male

TN

SEN

Incumbent R

Terry Adams

3

White

Male

TX

SEN

Incumbent R

David Alameel*

3

White

Male

AK

GOV

Incumbent R

Byron Mallot

3

White

Male

AL

GOV

Incumbent R

Parker Griffith*

3

White

Male

ID

GOV

Incumbent R

AJ Balukoff

3

White

Male

SD

GOV

Incumbent R

Joe Lowe*

3

White

Male

SC

SEN

Incumbent R (App)

Joyce Dickerson*

3

Black

Female

NE

SEN

Open R

David Domina*

3

White

Male

NE

GOV

Open R

Fred Duval

3

White

Male

As you can see here, beyond Cory Booker (who faced a real race in October but as of now has no real opponent), not only are the Democrats running a virtually all-white slate of candidates in the marquee statewide races, just about every Democrat in a hotly contested race this year is white. (Protip to activists: somebody with the time to put together a graphic of all these candidates could have some fun with it).

Should that matter? Of course not. Does it? Look at the primary results from this week’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in Texas – and you can see that white female abortion zealot Wendy Davis lost most of the Southwest Texas border counties – the places where Barack Obama did best in 2012 – to a primary opponent who has basically no campaign, but who had a Hispanic surname:

For a party so focused on “diversity” as a slogan and the turnout of non-white voting blocs as a lifeline, it’s hard to see why you would run that risk. Of course, a similar analysis of the leading Republicans would also show a heavily white, heavily male slate – but a little less so: Republicans are running two non-white incumbents in South Carolina, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, two incumbent Hispanic Governors in Brian Sandoval and Susanna Martinez, and a Native Hawaiian gubernatorial candidate, former two-term Lieutenant Governor Duke Aiona, as well as a number of white female candidates. And more to the point, Republicans are already doing fine with white voters; they’re not the ones who are existentially dependent upon firing up non-white voters with racial appeals. Democrats are – and so their failure to recruit and develop more non-white candidates adds yet another cause for alarm in what is already shaping up to be an alarming election season.

And if the results are ugly, that may make the Democrats rethink running a 69-year-old white woman as their national candidate in 2016.